NRA Win After 2012 Losses Shows Gap With Control Allies

The NRA’s power to sway federal lawmakers stems from its ability to motivate what it says are 4.5 million members to go to the polls, Democratic and Republican strategists said. Photographer: Linda Davidson/The Washington Post via Getty Images

April 18 (Bloomberg) -- The National Rifle Association used
the threat of an election-year backlash to tamp down U.S. Senate
support for expanded background checks on gun sales -- even
though the lobbying group lost almost every race it spent money
on during the 2012 campaign.

The NRA’s power to sway federal lawmakers stems from its
ability to motivate what it says are 4.5 million members to go
to the polls, Democratic and Republican strategists said. So far
gun-control groups haven’t proved an equal counterweight.

“I’m sure the NRA is popping champagne corks,” Senator
Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, said as he walked off the Senate
floor yesterday. Harkin voted for the background-check measure,
which failed to reach the 60 votes needed to prevent a
filibuster. Voting to support the proposal were 54 senators,
while 46 opposed it.

President Barack Obama blamed the demise of a compromise
version of his gun legislation package on the NRA and similar
groups and said advocates of change need to be “as passionate
and as organized and as vocal” as they are.

“The real impact is going to have to come from the
voters,” Obama said in the White House Rose Garden after the
vote as victims of gun violence stood by his side. “You need to
let your representative in Congress know that you are
disappointed, and if they don’t act this time, you will remember
come election time.”

NRA Scorecard

The NRA had announced on April 10 that senators’ votes on
the gun bill and its amendments would be included in its
legislative scorecard that measures, on an “A” to “F” scale,
lawmakers’ support for the group’s agenda. “If the NRA didn’t
score this, we’d have had 15 more votes,” Senator Joe Manchin,
a West Virginia Democrat and co-sponsor of the background-check
amendment, said today on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program.

The outcome of the four-month debate over gun control
illustrates the imbalance between the experienced NRA and the
pro-control organizations emerging in recent years that have yet
to match its messaging and grassroots mobilizing.

Former U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona,
who was injured in a shooting in Tucson in 2011, appealed to
supporters of her gun-control political committee after the
vote. If the Senate won’t vote for new gun laws, she said in the
e-mail, “then we need to change the members of the Senate.”

Election Challenge

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a co-founder of Mayors
Against Illegal Guns, made a similar pledge today at a news
conference at Rockefeller University in Manhattan. The mayor, 71
and a billionaire, is founder and majority owner of Bloomberg
News parent Bloomberg LP.

“You voted to have people out there who are mentally ill
and criminals, who’ve proven they’re bad people, to have guns on
the streets,” he said to the senators who opposed the bill.
“The next time you run for office, I’m going to be working for
the other side.”

Yet to make inroads, challenges facing gun-control
advocates include piercing the NRA’s intimidating reputation for
beating elected officials who stray on the gun control issue.

Vice President Joe Biden, who presided over the vote on
background checks, said earlier yesterday during an online chat
that one member of Congress he had met with spoke forthrightly
about why he would vote against a plan that polls show is
supported by as much as 90 percent of the public.

Showing Up

“The 10 percent who don’t agree, they’re going to show up,
and the 90 percent who think it’s a good idea, they’re not going
to vote for me or against me because of how I vote on this,”
Biden said the member told him.

Biden advised those watching the chat: “You gotta say,
’This means the most to me.’”

Biden’s Capitol Hill conversation reflects what political
scientists and congressional analysts have been saying: Gun
owners are far more likely to be single-issue voters than gun-control advocates.

Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein wrote March 28 on
his website, “A Plain Blog About Politics,” that the “problem
here is equating ’90 percent in the polls’ with ’calling for
change.’”

Passionate Base

The NRA has at its disposal a passionate base of
supporters, which it stokes with angry and sometimes exaggerated
rhetoric about gun measures.

Obama said yesterday that the gun lobby “willfully lied”
about the background-check measure, telling its members it would
start a gun registry. The legislation included a provision
specifically banning such a roster of gun owners. PolitiFact, a
St. Petersburg, Florida-based group that fact-checks political
ads, labeled the NRA assertion a “pants on fire” false
statement.

“NRA members are what people in the activism world call
champions,” said Blain Rethmeier, a Republican strategist and
former press secretary on Capitol Hill. “They are more than
supporters. They are willing to take action and see to it that
you don’t get re-elected. The senators know this.”

Senator John Boozman, a NRA “A-rated” Republican from
Arkansas, said he received “lots of mail” from constituents on
the gun-regulation legislation, “probably as much mail as I’ve
received on any issue.”

‘Very Concerned’

Boozman said the sentiment is split “probably 80-20”
percent opposed to more restrictions on gun purchases. “They
are just very concerned in this climate that somebody is going
to confiscate their guns,” he said in an interview. He voted
against the background-check expansion.

Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, said he has
listened to “very passionate views on the issue. People feel
strongly, they communicate.”

Rated “B-plus” by the NRA, McCain voted in favor of the
background-check measure.

“I understand that will affect my rating with the NRA,”
he said.

Chris Cox, a spokesman for the Fairfax, Virginia-based NRA,
said the expanded background checks “will not reduce violent
crime.” The group, he said in a statement, will keep working
with both parties on measures that help prosecute “violent
criminals.”

The NRA’s win on background checks comes after its losses
last November, when the group spent millions of dollars in an
unsuccessful bid to oust Obama and made a combined $4 million in
investments in Senate races in Ohio, Virginia, Missouri,
Indiana, Wisconsin and Florida, according to the Center for
Responsive Politics, a Washington-based group that tracks
political spending. All of the NRA-backed candidates in those
Senate races lost.

NRA Survivor

Senator Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat with an “F” rating
from the NRA, was one of the targeted candidates who overcame
the gun lobby’s opposition to win his seat last year. He wrote
in an April 9, 2013, opinion column in the Virginian-Pilot
newspaper that “the power of the organization’s leadership is
vastly overrated.”

Just 5.2 percent of the $18 million the NRA spent on
campaigns last year helped their preferred candidate win,
according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

“Is the NRA as politically powerful as it used to be?”
asked Jim Manley, a Democratic strategist and former Senate
aide. “If you look at the Senate this afternoon, the answer is
yes. But the fact is that there are large sections of the
country where it just doesn’t resonate anymore.”

2014 Elections

A challenge for gun-control advocates is that seats up for
grabs in 2014 Senate races includes several in western states
where the NRA’s voice can move voters.

Four Democrats opposed the background-check legislation:
Max Baucus of Montana, Mark Begich of Alaska, Heidi Heitkamp of
North Dakota and Mark Pryor of Arkansas. All represent states
that backed 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney,
who beat Obama in their states by an average margin of 18
percentage points. Baucus, Begich and Pryor are up for re-election next year.

‘Definitional’ Moment

Geoffrey Garin, president of the polling firm Hart Research
Associates, said yesterday that voting against gun legislation
“becomes definitional, showing whether someone is in the
mainstream or out of the mainstream.”

In a conference call arranged by the Democratic National
Committee, Garin said continued Republican opposition to gun
legislation supported by most of the public risks
“degradation” of the party’s brand.

Gun-control groups and the NRA will enter the next campaign
showdown with target lists provided by the Senate vote, and they
have already begun spending money.

Mayors Against Illegal Guns spent $12 million on television
ads to pressure senators on the legislation, with the money
coming from Bloomberg. Through his super-political action
committee, Independence USA, he also has spent more than $10
million in federal elections this year and last, much of it
aimed at defeating NRA-backed candidates.

In another echo of the NRA, the mayors’ group announced
that it, too, would rate members of Congress on their gun votes
and publicize that information come election time.

Organizing for Action, a nonprofit formed from remnants of
Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, plans to hold events in the
states of senators it sees as “key” to expanding background
checks. This could include the Democratic senators who voted
against the legislation.

Breaking ‘Stranglehold’

“The gun lobby’s power overall is receding, as shown by
the last election,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, a
Connecticut Democrat who overcame $100,000 in NRA attack ads in
his 2010 election. “The special interests like the NRA have
long held a stranglehold, but we’re determined to break it.”

Reaching a majority of the Senate to favor expanded
background checks -- as well as last week achieving the 60 votes
needed to even consider the gun bill, S. 649 -- showed that the
gun lobby’s power is waning, Blumenthal said.

“Just 4 1/2 months ago, this topic was politically
untouchable,” he said in an interview. “About 10 days ago, 60
votes was completely unreachable. We reached 60 votes last week
to continue the debate, and I think we can turn the tide on this
one.”